In a general way the present invention concerns electronic circuit cards and data acquisition and generation systems including such cards, in particular in the aeronautical field.
Aircraft are equipped with various electronic systems providing various functions enabling the aircraft to fulfil its role. In particular, these electronic systems include signal acquisition and generation systems in order to interface them to numerous sensors and actuators. These signals include signals of various types, notably discrete signal inputs DSI and discrete signal outputs DSO, analog signals, such as direct current analog input signals ANI-DC, alternating current analog input signals ANI-AC, analog output signals ANO, and digital input/output signals, such as ARINC429 signals. The ARINC 429 aeronautical standard covers the communication of digital data.
Known prior art signal acquisition and generation systems use dedicated electronic circuits for each type of input/output signal. The known systems therefore include as many electronic circuit cards as there are types of signals to be acquired or generated, which makes the system costly, bulky and complex. The maintenance of such a system is also time-consuming.
Moreover, these known prior art systems are dedicated to the aircraft equipped with them. If the technical environment of a computer, for example the number and/or type of inputs/outputs to be processed, changes, then new circuit cards must be designed. In a similar way, it is very complicated to reuse a data acquisition and generation system to equip an aircraft not having the same number and type of inputs/outputs to be processed.
Moreover, it is very often found that the circuit cards of a data acquisition and generation system of one aircraft cannot be reused to produce the system for another aircraft because the signal segregation constraints differ between the two aircraft. Compliance with the segregation constraints implies that the connection interfaces have no portions that could lead to faults in other portions.